Coaching top sales performers and coaching underperformers are two different jobs, and most sales managers run them as one. The weekly one-on-one looks the same for the salesperson at 90% of goal and the one at 40%: pull up the pipeline, ask when it closes, push on a few dates. One of those salespeople is confident they will exceed their goal while the other is drowning, and neither one is getting coached.
That is a waste of the most valuable hour on a sales manager’s calendar. Here’s how to match the coaching to the salesperson, starting with why the same conversation cannot work for both.
Why Sales Coaching Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
A sales team is not a single performance problem. It is a collection of people at different stages of their careers, with different sales skill gaps, who need different things from the sales manager in front of them. The salesperson who is new and developing needs skill-building and short feedback loops. The star performer needs a challenge and a reason to keep sharpening. The plateaued sales veteran needs a specific behavior named and a path back to growth. The non-performer needs clarity, a timeline, and a decision.
Run one coaching playbook across all four and you get what our State of Sales Performance research found across the board: 79% of salespeople rate themselves capable in sales conversations, while only 45% of their leaders agree. That 34-point gap is where coaching is supposed to happen. It stays open when managers coach the team as an average instead of coaching each person against their own gap.
Sales coaching that fits the development needs of each individual salesperson is more precise, and precision is what moves the number.
The Four Sales Performance Quadrants and What Each One Needs
In our High-Performance Sales Coaching program, we sort every salesperson into one of four quadrants based on results and trajectory. The quadrant tells the manager what kind of conversation to have.
1. New or Developing Sales Reps
These salespeople have potential and not much track record. Sales coaching here is about building skill fast and building confidence alongside it. Keep the focus narrow, one behavior at a time, and keep the feedback loop short. Joint calls do more for this group than any other, because they get to watch the skill before they are asked to run it.
2. The Star Sales Performer
High results and a strong trajectory. This is the salesperson managers leave alone, and leaving them alone is a mistake. Stars stagnate when nobody challenges them, and they leave when nobody invests in them. More on this group below.
3. Plateaued Salesperson
Solid history, flat trajectory. The plateaued salesperson usually has one or two behaviors that stopped evolving while the market kept moving. Start sales coaching by naming the specific sales skill that has gone stale, because this group has heard “just do more” for years and tuned it out.
4. Non-Performer
Low results and no upward movement. The coaching conversation has to be honest about what is expected, what has to change, and by when. Done well, it is a sales performance-management conversation with a real chance of recovery. Done late, it is a conversation that should have happened two quarters ago.
How to Coach Top Sales Performers
The star performer gets the least coaching on most teams, and I understand why. They hit the number. They do not ask for help. The manager has four fires elsewhere. So the one-on-one turns into a pipeline update and everybody moves on.
Here is what that costs. A top performer who is not being developed is a top performer who is deciding, slowly, that this is as good as it gets here. They stop growing, the market catches up to them, and at some point a competitor offers them the challenge their manager never did.
Coaching a star is a different conversation. The manager is not fixing a gap. They are raising the ceiling. Three things work.
#1: Reinforce what is working, out loud and specifically.
Most coaching is built to find problems, and stars rarely hear which of their behaviors the manager wants more of. Name it. That builds confidence and it builds retention.
#2: Challenge them with a skill that is adjacent to what they already do well.
A salesperson who closes transactional business consistently can be coached toward larger, multi-stakeholder deals. A strong closer can be coached on margin. The point is to give them somewhere to go.
#3: Leverage Their Skillsets to Mentor Developing Reps
Put them on joint calls with developing salespeople, not as a reward but as a coaching assignment with a pre-call plan and a debrief. Teaching a skill sharpens it, and it turns a star’s results into something the rest of the team can learn from instead of something they can only watch.
How to Coach Underperformers Without Guessing
The most common mistake with underperformers is coaching the result instead of the behavior. The manager sees a quota miss and coaches to the miss: more calls, more pipeline, more effort. If the real gap is discovery, or handling objections, or time management, more activity produces more of the same outcome.
Coaching without data is opinion, and opinion rarely changes behavior. Before the conversation, the manager needs to know which specific skill is behind the number. That is what a sales competency assessment is for. It replaces “you need to step it up” with “your questioning and your recommendations are both rated as needing attention, so for the next month we are working on discovery.”
Once the behavior is named, the conversation follows the same structure every time. Clarify the issue. Observe how the salesperson reacts, because you learn a lot from whether they already knew. Advise with specific guidance. Commend what is working, because even an underperformer has something to build on. Then hand off, so the salesperson owns the action and the accountability. We teach it as C.O.A.C.H., and it works for the star and the struggler alike. What changes is the content, not the structure.
One Cadence, Four Different Conversations
The structure that holds all of this together is a rhythm the team can count on. A weekly one-on-one focused on one skill and one opportunity. A monthly deep dive on a single competency across the team. A quarterly review that evaluates results and resets priorities. The cadence is the same for every quadrant. What the manager brings into each conversation is what changes.
That rhythm is also what keeps training from fading. Our research found that 57% of salespeople say they understand their organization’s sales methodology, while 29% say the team executes it consistently. Sales training builds the skill. A sales coaching cadence that fits each salesperson is what turns the skill into a habit.
Build a Sales Coaching Culture That Improves Performance
Ask your sales managers one question this week: which quadrant is each of their salespeople in, and what is the coaching focus for each one? If the answer is a list of deals, the team is being inspected, not coached.
Tyson Group’s High-Performance Sales Coaching program gives managers the quadrant model, the C.O.A.C.H. framework, and the cadence to run it, and pairs it with competency data so every coaching conversation starts from a real gap rather than a guess.
